Some/many board members have done well with NVDA, myself included. I often try to find reasons for investments that have done well for me to turn, and for Nvidia, the best I’ve come up with is:
Some Data Center build-outs are delayed or even cancelled. Data Center Watch counts $18 billion of projects blocked and another $46 billion delayed over roughly two years amid local opposition, with at least 142 activist groups across 24 states. Maybe that’s over-stated, as are some stats that half of all proposed Data Center build-outs have been cancelled, but there is some effect and some communities have put moratoriums in place for approvals. Power and water usage are often cited as concerns.
In Oct/Nov of last year, Microsoft flagged this as an issue, and even said that it is being forced to stockpile Nvidia GPUs since it can’t complete the data centers in time to deploy them. I believe this is why both Anthropic and Google were willing to pay higher than NeoCloud rates for instant, or in Google’s case, near-instant access to deployed GPUs from SpaceX.
When you factor in that the hyperscalers like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and even Meta and Oracle are taking on debt to fund their AI build-outs, doesn’t it make sense that they would at least curtail future Nvidia purchases?
Now, there are some factors that work against this:
- Nvidia’s customer profile has shifted - hyperscalers are down to about 50% of the customer base, sovereign (government), NeoClouds, some industrial customers are on the rise.
- Hyperscalers don’t want to lose their place in line to buy Nvidia chips. Delaying previous orders means going to the back of what still is a long line and so they might have to wait beyond the Data Center build delay to get Nvidia servers.
- Overall demand is still very high, the order que is long, so even if some companies do drop out, it’s not like Nvidia is going to be sitting on product - they’ll probably still sell everything they make when they make them.
Anyone have thoughts or data on this?